What difference does it make to the way we read Ulysses
that Leopold Bloom is a Jew, or rather, that he is thought by most
of Dublin to be a Jew? In the past decade, research into the
question of Ulysses and Jewishness has been largely
dominated by two main approaches, one concerned with content, and
the other with form. Content-oriented critics such as Neil Davison
focus on the representation of Bloom as a "Jew," and tend to
ignore the formal and stylistic innovations of Ulysses,
treating them as distractions in an essentially "realist" novel.
The form-oriented critics examine Joycean textuality itself for
signs of Jewishness—say, through analogies to the Talmud (Ira
Nadel), or to Levinas's philosophy (Steven Connor)—in a way that
tends to bracket the question of the specific function and
representation of Bloom, as well as to promote a disturbingly
fetishized notion of Jewishness. What I want to propose here is a
way to synthesize the premise that thinking about Jewishness in
Ulysses means thinking about Bloom, with the insight that
this thinking needs at the same time to account for the peculiar
formal innovations that give Ulysses its place in literary
history. I should also point out that other critics, most notably
Bryan Cheyette and Marilyn Reizbaum, have acknowledged and
addressed the self-consciousness with which Joyce invokes the
notion of "Jewishness," however their accounts lack a consideration
of the particular literary techniques and styles that
distinguish Ulysses: this essay attempts to remedy this
omission in critical discussions of Joyce.

In what follows I propose that the way to achieve this synthesis
is by thinking less about the identity of either Bloom or
the text and more about structural similarities in the way both
Bloom and the work Ulysses are perceived by others. In
particular, I want to draw attention to a certain conceptual
homology between the anti-Semitic notion of "the Jew" and aspects
of Ulysses' form, insofar as both might be seen to represent
the abstract realm of social relations under industrial
capitalism.

The account of modern anti-Semitism that I find most productive
in this context is that put forward by the social theorist Moishe
Postone. In "Anti-Semitism and National Socialism," Postone focuses
on romantic anticapitalism's confusion of the appearance of
capitalist relations for their "essence." Capitalist social
relations appear

antinomically, as the opposition of the abstract and
concrete. Because . . . both sides of the antinomy are objectified,
each appears to be quasi-natural. The abstract dimension appears in
the form of abstract, universal, "objective," natural laws; the
concrete dimension appears as pure "thingly" nature.

Romantic anticapitalism, however, hypostatizes the concrete,
rooted, and organic, and identifies capitalism solely with the
abstract dimension of the antinomy. As Postone asserts, romantic
anticapitalism does not understand "That concrete labor itself
incorporates and is materially formed by capitalist social
relations [the abstract dimension]" ("ANS," 309).

According to Postone, modern anti-Semitism takes this romantic
anticapitalist model a step further and sees the abstract dimension
of capitalist social relations (for the romantic anticapitalist,
capitalism as such) personified in the Jews. Central to the story
Postone tells is the observation that

the specific characteristics of the power attributed to
the Jews by modern anti-Semitism—abstractness, intangibility,
universality, mobility . . . are all characteristics of the
[abstract] value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx.
Moreover, this dimension, like the supposed power of the Jews, does
not appear as such, but always in the form of a material carrier,
the commodity. ["ANS," 308]

In other words, "the Jew" as imagined by modern anti-Semitism
solves the problem of finding a concrete embodiment, or, more
precisely, a personification, for powerful social and
economic forces that otherwise lack a material manifestation. The
Jew serves to personify processes within finance capital that have
no concrete manifestation, that are quite literally
unrepresentable. Thus we might infer that the problem that
anti-Semitism solves is a problem of representation, and that
anti-Semitism must therefore possess an intrinsically aesthetic
dimension. An aesthetic dimension, and a specific kind of aesthetic
at that: the Jew gives a human shape to the abstract
circuits and...

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